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+--- Thread: The Mogollon Railroad (/showthread.php?tid=508)
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 02-25-2014
And a progress shot - I'm liking the way this is coming out. I think the turntable bridge needs a railing. The turntable spins freely, and I've got the rails pretty well leveled out so things should work just fine. I'm contemplating a motor and indexing system. I've got a bunch of motors and gears I salvaged from old electronics I took apart - maybe I can get some of them to work. I've only got 3 tracks leading to the TT, so an indexing system may not be too difficult.
I did mess one thing up. If you look in the previous photo of the engine house, you can see the track in the left stall is not centered. Somehow I mis-measured. I am going to need to fix that, because the locomotives hit the side of the opening. At first this seemed like a huge problem, but the more I think about it, I think I can fix it without huge worries.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nkp_174 - 02-27-2014
A railing would be ok, but I bet an armstrong bar for turning it would add more and require less effort.
Sorry about the stall/track alignment. At least it happened with the NG and not the less forgiving SG.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 02-27-2014
Michael, an Armstrong bar is a great idea. After I put my widest loco on there (MDC Shay), I realized that if I put a railing on the deck, it will be awfully close to the side of the loco. Probably best to leave it off, or search for more prototype photos. There was a turntable on the 3' gauge in Jerome, Arizona with a similar 2-stall enginehouse like this. Somewhere, once, I found a photo of it.
I did notice something cool last night as I was putting ground cover around the turntable - this is by far the most completed I have ever had a layout. I'm soon to have almost no bare benchwork left. If I was a LPB on my layout, I could walk from corner to corner to corner through completed scenery. Once I get the enginehouse done, I have two more major buildings to construct, and one is 3/4 done. I will have one more short siding to put in, and after that it's pretty much all detailing and finishing touches. Pretty cool!
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nkp_174 - 03-01-2014
Cool! Congrats on the personal accomplishment!
So, it sounds like you'll be ready to break out the soldering iron again as the Magma Arizona 2-4-0 will be back on your horizon?
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 04-10-2014
Yep, been thinking about the Magma 2-4-2 quite a bit lately. I think I finally have what I need to get going on that project again.
I've been trying to work out my roster in general, and think I finally have enough HOn3 cars to have a decent and workable roster. I'll have 4 locos - two 2-8-0s, a shay, and the 2-6-2t. The 2-4-2 as mentioned above won't be part of my "official" roster.
Flat cars will start at #100 Right now I have 4, and maybe fun to build a few more.
I've got two tank cars starting at #126. I don't need any more.
Box cars will start at #140. I've got one short one, the rest are 30 footers. They are hodgepodge, so I will say they were purchased second hand. I've got the short car, and then 6 more. That should be adequate for now.
Passenger cars are numbered starting at 200, and I have 4, and have one more I am kitbashing out of parts. That's more than I need.
Work cars/cabooses start at 400. This includes water cars, ballast cars, and other utility cars or one-of-a kind cars. Cabooses are #450 and 451. I only need two cabooses.
Coal and hopper cars start at 500, and I have 6. I don't need any more of those.
I'm not sure why I skipped over the 300s. Maybe the railroad ownership thought those were unlucky numbers.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 04-21-2014
Sitting around thinking one day - I realized that my town has roads, but no roads actually exit the layout's edge
. Somehow, this bothers me, because prior to the arrival of the railroad in town, the first settlers and prospectors had to come by horse and wagon, and that means a road. And such a small layout - it just seems like an obvious flaw - like the parking lot without an exit or cars driving towards the end of a dead-end street we often see on layouts. And that really bothers me! So, I extended one road to the layout's edge, created this little concrete retaining wall to "stabilize" the slope, and now the LPBs have a way to travel to the unmodeled sections of town and adjacent towns without having to hop on the train 
I still need a guardrail of some sort. You can also see the stairwell I added for the LPBs to get from their houses to the lower parts of town without having to take the "long route".
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - Tyson Rayles - 04-21-2014
Are you not worried that with road access you will have less train riders and therefor less revenue?
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - ray_m - 04-22-2014
Nice work Kevin.
I look forward to seeing what you use for railings. I have some areas with similar hazards.
I also had (and still have) land locked roads. I solved this situation in one area by installing a tunnel portal in one of the mountains for road access.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 04-22-2014
Ray - I didn't think about a tunnel - but that would have been fun, too. But I think what I did was probably the easiest option. I've already started on a guard rail. I took a bamboo skewer and cut it up to make short vertical posts and glued them into holes along the edge of the roadway. I then cut sections of stripwood to span between the posts, and glued to the side of the posts that faces the road. I'll finish it up and post photos later.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 04-23-2014
here's a view with the guardrail in place. Still need lots of details
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - ray_m - 04-23-2014
The guard rails look fine to me.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - doctorwayne - 04-23-2014
Yeah, it does look good and it adds interest and believability to the scene, too.Wayne
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 04-24-2014
For some reason I didn't think my layout was "busy" enough. I want that busy, haphazard, cramped, mining town look. I think I keep getting hung up on researching whether something is plausible or prototypical and not just letting my creative juices flow and doing something. So, here is Ace Supply Co. I'm not sure what they supply, tools, firewood, building materials, and miscellaneous stuff, I guess. They have a small loading dock at the end of the line, probably not a good place to spot cars for long (it's the tail end of the run-around track). The building I think is a life-like kit that was once on my younger brother's childhood layout, that I kitbashed a little, put on my last layout, and recently fixed up some more.
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - mountaingoatgreg - 04-26-2014
Kevin,
I was looking through your photos and was enjoying how narrow everything is and then was reading your comments about wanting it to be more cramped and full feeling. I think the look of mining towns is very fascinating, nothing I would probably ever model, but still fun to look at. I definitely feel that you are headed in the right direction of cramped, narrow with lots of things squeezed in out of necessity.
Do you have room to extend the dock and add a ramp to the back side of the new building? You could make it a freight forwarder that handles misc shipments for non rail served customers. So they could spot empty flats where equipment could be loaded and shipped out to the mine or a single boxcar for mine supplies.
Keep up the great work!
Re: The Mogollon Railroad - nachoman - 05-26-2014
A progress photo from around the yard. I built the water tower probably 20 years ago, toilet paper tube and cardboard and a cast plaster base. I recently pulled it out of the box, fixed damage, and added more details.